Barbie (Mike Vogel) sends a message to those on the other side of the dome. (PHOTO: CBS)

So, finally, we got to see on Monday night the first episode of the feverishly anticipated, for Stephen King fans at the very least, CBS adaption of his 2009 novel Under the Dome. CBS has decided that instead of going the miniseries route, they’ll stretch the plot (and, one assumes, add some subplots) of King’s 1,000-plus-page book into a 13-week series.

Author Stephen King in Bridgton, Maine, which served as the basis for the fictional town where his "Under the Dome" is set. (PHOTO: Stacey Cramp/The New York Times)

It has a good pedigree, with Stephen Spielberg and King as executive producers, and Brian K. Vaughn as the writer (at least of this episode). If it’s a hit, it could come back next year, with potentially truly horrible effects for the people under that dome (no incoming food, water, electricity, clothing, fuel, anything). Of course, the people stranded on a certain J.J. Abrams-conjured desert island were there for six seasons, so anything’s possible.

SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading now if you haven’t seen Episode 1: Pilot.

The first scene of Under the Dome was nicely metaphorical and teasing — an egg that at first glance looked like the earth, then with a camera pan back revealed a baby chick hatching its way to freedom. It wasn’t exactly sweet, though; more Stephen King-creepy, as if that chick might grow up to eat all of humanity. Or as if the titular dome might be some egg-terrarium thingy for capturing and cultivating humans as food. Who knows? (Well, I do, because I’ve read the book, but I’m certainly not going to say here — if you’re not afraid of knowing the plot, my review that ran in November 2009 is at the very end of this blog post.)

Most of this episode, by necessity, involved simply the introduction of the inciting incident and the main characters. Inciting incident: With no warning except a very brief cacophony of monstrous winds, birds screeching, sirens blaring, church bells clanging and ground shaking, an invisible but extremely solid dome drops over the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, pop. 1,152. When the drop occurs, dirt sprays upward all around the town, leaving a neat circle of indented earth where the thing fell — it’s not glass, apparently, nor plastic, and seems impenetrable. Cars crash into it. Birds with their little noggins smushed tumble from the clear blue sky. A small plane explodes in a fireball after hitting what seems to be absolutely nothing.

Before all that happens, we got a few clues to the characters: A traveler, Dale “Barbie” Barbara (Mike Vogel, whom you may know as Deputy Zack Shelby on Bates Motel) is burying a body. The town’s police chief, Duke Perkins (Jeff Fahey, of Lost) is sleeping it off in a jail cell.

In the diner, glad-handing city council member/used-car dealer (of course) “Big Jim” Rennie (the fabulous Dean Norris from Breaking Bad) leaves $100 for his breakfast. “That’s me buying your next vote,” he tells the waitress with a grin. Two young lovers, Angie (Britt Robertson) and Junior (Alexander Koch), talk about their inevitable break-up when he goes back to college. He’s not going, he announces. “You’re the only person who knows the real me,” he pleads. “That’s why I can’t be with you,” she replies. He grabs her, hard, as she starts to leave, and she slaps him.

Julia Shumway (Rachelle Lefevre, Twilight), the incumbent newspaper editor/reporter (who has abundant red curls that a real reporter could never maintain that gloriously, just let me say right now), responds to a call from a woman who’s concerned about the excessive propane deliveries she’s been witnessing nearby.

Oh, and here’s a really bad coincidence: All of the town’s firetrucks have zipped off to neighboring Westlake for a parade. So if there’s a fire, you know, after the dome falls, well, sorry.

Colin Ford as Joe, the smartest kid in Chester's Mill. (PHOTO: CBS)

When the dome drops, Barbie is racing out of town, and he almost makes it. He’s close enough to the thing to see a cow sliced clean in two, lengthwise. When Police Chief Duke, and his deputy Linda Esquivel (Natalie Martinez) show up, his pacemaker goes wonky and he nearly has a heart attack. Barbie puts his hand on the dome and gets a nasty shock, and also leaves a very King-esque bloody handprint, courtesy of the deceased cow. A kid, Joe McAlister (Colin Ford), of course, wanders into the carnage. Every good King story has a really smart kid whom everyone ignores till it’s nearly too late. This one is also Angie’s brother.

Julia, on-the-ball reporter that she is, shows up when the plane falls out of the sky, only to have her car commandeered by Big Jim to speed rescue efforts. A mom and her two adult daughters also get trapped under the dome. One daughter has a seizure and starts babbling about “the stars are falling.” Big Jim, whose favorite saying is “We’re all in this together,” turns out to have a very pronounced dictatorial quality that shows up immediately after the catastrophe. Junior turns out to be both Rennie’s son and a psychopath — when Angie rejects him, he kidnaps her and imprisons her in the family’s metal root cellar for her “safety.” Joe’s on his own now; their mom was having lunch at the new Denny’s in Westlake when the dome fell.

Julia gets a ride to the hospital with Barbie, worried about her doctor-hubby, Peter, till she finds out that he’s not working that Sunday and apparently hasn’t been for weeks, despite what he’s told her. Conclusion: He’s having an affair. Grimness starts to set in as night falls. The National Guard arrives with lots of people in spacesuits, waving around radiation-detection wands. A candy striper bums a cigarette from Barbie outside the hospital. “Some of the patients say it’s like we’re stuck in a giant fishbowl,” she tells him. “I used to have fish, goldfish, but then one of them got sick and died and the other one ate him. Did you even know they did that? Goldfish?” Can you say “FORESHADOWING”?

Meanwhile, at City Hall, Rennie’s the only council member who’s shown up, and he notes that it’s easy to reach consensus when there’s only one guy to listen to. He wants to start deputizing people to add to the police force, an idea that Duke quickly quashes: “The last thing this mess needs is amateurs with badges. Till I hear from the mayor or above, you’re not authorizing anything.” Rennie accedes, but then sidles up to Duke and whispers, “What do we do when people start asking about the propane? … Stockpiling fuel right before a disaster? You were more than happy to turn a blind eye, but you’re not dumb. Just reminding you what the lay of the land is. We’re all in this together.” And with that, he smiles, dare I say it, a very J.R. Ewing-esque smile.

Since the motels are all booked, Julia offers to let Barbie stay with her. She’s certain her husband will come home and explain the inexplicable about his whereabouts, but meanwhile, she tells Barbie, “You saved a kid’s life today [he pulled Joe out from under the falling plane bits], and I’m not about to let you sleep out here like an animal.”

On the town bridge, teenagers party, as they will when the grown-ups are preoccupied with possible apocalyptic scenarios (unless they’re named Katniss, and that’s another story). Joe, the smart one, searches around, peering at the sky, the earth and everything in between. “You looking for something?” another kid asks. “Yeah, an off switch. It’s gotta have an off-switch.” The dome, he means. Then, he has a seizure similar to the girl’s earlier, and he also starts mumbling: “Stars are falling. Stars are falling in lines.”

In the diner, people congregate by candlelight and speculate: alien attack? attack from a hostile nation? bizarre reality show? (OK, that one was my idea.) People are told to look out for one another, to check on their neighbors. We’ll see how long that lasts when the fresh food and water start running out.

A Chester's Mill police officer (Natalie Martinez) and her firefighter fiance press hands from either side of the dome; she's in, he's out. (PHOTO: CBS)

Back at the dome’s border, Duke and his deputy ponder. “Why Chester’s Mills?” she asks. Why us?” Duke: “Maybe we’re being punished. You’re a good policewoman, but there’s a lot I’ve tried to protect you from, about this place. A little over a year ago I was approached about … ” and then he touches the dome, and his pacemaker explodes out of his chest, and we never hear the end of that sentence. I have a feeling it has something to do with extra propane.

My review of the original book, which ran Nov. 15, 2009, is no longer on our website, but because I love you, here it is. Spoilers abound, of course, for the TV series.

Brought to you this week in popular culture: the apocalypse. On the one hand, there’s 2012, the new movie about those Mayan prophesies of doom for Dec. 21, 2012, with stunning CGI effects so realistic and horrifying they’ll have you begging for your mommy.

On the other hand, there’s Stephen King’s new novel, Under the Dome, with no CGI effects at all, just King’s wicked imagination. It’s nearly 1,100 pages of stuff so scary that you’ll realize early on that even if Mommy were Wonder Woman, she couldn’t help you out of this nightmare. 2012 presents the end of the world on grand, global scale: terrifying, but somehow reassuringly remote. King doesn’t know from remote. His is an apocalypse of ghastly, intimate proportions, visited on the bucolic Maine town of Chester’s Mills and its citizens as the outer world watches, horrified but unable to assist.

On a gorgeous October morning in Chester’s Mills, a plane crumbles, explodes and falls out of the sky. A deer gets decapitated by an invisible blade; similarly, a woman’s hand is cut off as she reaches for a rotted pumpkin besmirching her garden. Soon it becomes clear that an impermeable, invisible dome has plummeted down, covering the town.

Communication is possible with the folks on the other side. You can hear through the dome, but get too close with an electronic item, and it’s going to get fried — especially bad news for those with pacemakers.

The isolation of a community is a neat trick, although certainly not new (Lost, Lord of the Flies, any number of Twilight Zone episodes). But King, like all great storytellers, hinges things not on the mere plot of what’s happening but on how it alternately corrupts and elevates the character of the humans involved.

There’s a cast of hundreds, but the main characters we come to root for and loathe are Dale Barbara, called Barbie, an Iraq war vet turned short-order cook who was on his way out of town when the dome descended, and Jim Rennie, an oily alderman who uses the situation to take control. Soon he’s got the lily-livered police chief hiring teenage thugs and arming them, a spectacularly bad idea under any circumstances.

Among the new enforcers is Rennie’s reptile-brained son, Junior, who’s got the bodies of two murdered girls stashed away in a pantry. As Junior’s iffy hold on reality slips further, extreme ickiness ensues.

Along with keeping wary eyes on such bad guys, Barbie and his cohort must try to suss out the dome’s origins. Terrorists? Extraterrestrials? Freak effect of global warming? The answer is curdling in its simplicity.

As always, King brilliantly throws in witty little Easter eggs for his longtime fans, as well as plenty of cultural and political references. The timeline is a bit sketchy, but we know it’s after 2012 — hah! take that, Mayans! — because someone’s Volvo has a fading bumper sticker that reads, “Obama ’12! Yes we still can!”

This book will remind many King readers of The Stand, long acknowledged as his masterpiece. Under the Dome comes close to eclipsing that book, if only because of its familiar-yet-claustrophobic setting. A small town of a few square miles can begin to feel very close, very stuffy and very much like a polluted terrarium after being closed off for a few days.

You’ll definitely want to read this one, but trust me and do so in a well-ventilated room with plenty of sunlight and a source of fresh water nearby. Don’t start it the same day you see 2012.

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